Review 2581: Murder at Gulls Nest

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I messed up a bit with this book. What happened was that as soon as I heard about it, I pre-ordered it because I love Jess Kidd’s books. Then a few months later, although I am no longer active on NetGalley, I received an email from a publicist asking if I would like a review copy. I answered, as I have for other books, that I would love to if I could get a paperback rather than an ebook.

As usual when I make this request, I got no reply, so I dismissed it from my mind. Then, when I received a copy quite a bit later, I assumed it was my pre-order, not even noticing that it was a review copy. I put it at the top of my pile, which I have been ignoring while I try to finish A Century of Books (now complete!). I apologize to that publicist, because I have missed the dates. It wasn’t until my pre-order arrived that I realized my mistake, but then I read it immediately. So, here’s my review—better late than never.

It’s the 1950s. Nora Breen, looking disheveled, arrives in a seaside town in winter. She is a middle-aged ex-nun who has renounced her vows, and she has arrived because her friend Frieda, sent from the monastery for her health, has stopped writing. That is unlike Frieda, and Nora is worried about her.

Nora has taken a room at Gulls Nest, a sad rooming house, where she finds she is to occupy Frieda’s room. She learns that Frieda just disappeared one evening, no one apparently being surprised by it.

The occupants of the house are a mixed crew. Helena Wills, a widow, is the owner, but she spends almost all her time in bed and lets Irene Rawlings, the grim housekeeper who has lots of rules, run it. Helena also has a young daughter Dinah, who is all but feral. As she arrives, Nora watches a young couple from afar, Teddy and Stella Atkins, and notices them appearing to quarrel. She also sees another lodger, Karel Ježek, stomp on Teddy’s hat. Other lodgers are Bill Carter, an ex-Navy cook who works as a bartender, and Professor Poppy, an old Punch and Judy puppeteer who is rumored to be an aristocrat.

Although Nora goes immediately to the police, Inspector Rideout thinks there’s nothing unusual about someone who was living at Gulls Nest disappearing without warning. Nora has decided not to reveal to anyone else her friendship with Frieda, hoping she will learn more if no one is aware of it. However, she is feeling frustrated when Teddy is found dead in Poppy’s workshop behind the house, poisoned with cyanide in his coffee. Teddy often had coffee with Poppy before work. Inspector Rideout is thinking suicide, but Stella says not. She has just told him she is pregnant. So, did Teddy commit suicide or was he murdered? If he was murdered, was he the intended victim or was Poppy? Finally, is Teddy’s death related to Frieda’s disappearance?

Like Kidd’s other books, this one has some eccentric characters, although it is perhaps not as unexpected as her others. Still, it has some likable characters and some twists, as Nora begins to blossom out into this new world. A secret about the relationship between two characters was one I guessed fairly quickly, but I was unable to figure out a motive for what turns out to be not just one murder.

Fun stuff!

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for a free and fair review.

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If I Gave the Award

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Having read all of the shortlisted books for the 2022 Booker Prize, I see that it is time for my feature in which I decide whether the judges got it right. For this year the choice is difficult for me because I didn’t like many of the books.

As I sometimes do, I’ll start with the book I liked least. That is Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo. Bulawayo’s intent was to explain events in the recent history of Zimbabwe, but her choice to make the characters animals did nothing for me. In fact, it made the characters flat. I also had little tolerance for all the religious and political speeches, and the book’s repetition. I did not finish this book after reading more than half of it.

There was something strange to me also about the approach Percival Everett takes with The Trees. This novel is about the lynching of Black people that took place for centuries in the American South and in particular, the murder of Emmett Till. However, Everett makes it a mystery about some grotesque murders and creates Southern white characters who are almost caricatures of themselves. On reflection, for such a serious subject it seems to indicate an odd sense of humor.

The winner for this year was The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, about a dead man who is trying to reveal photographs he has taken of the Sri Lankan civil war. I was very interested in the history of Sri Lanka, which is not a country I know about, but I didn’t enjoy his depiction of a grotesque afterlife. (The book reminded me a bit of the afterlife depicted in George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, although I found that book ultimately more touching.)

Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker is a fantasy novella about a boy left alone in an unusual world. It was interesting and imaginative, a fast read that resembled a fairy tale, but it didn’t do much for me.

I always like a book by Elizabeth Strout because of the writing and the gentleness with which she treats her characters. However, Oh, William!, about Lucy Barton’s ex-husband and his family secrets, seemed slight to me when compared to some of the other books.

The book I enjoyed most for its writing and its theme was Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, about the Magdalen laundries. Keegan is another excellent writer. I guess I’ll pick it for its beautiful, pared-down prose.

Review 2580: Treacle Walker

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I read Treacle Walker for my Booker Prize project. It is an unusual novella that reads a bit like a fairy tale or myth.

Joseph Cappock is a young boy with a lazy eye who wears an eye patch and lives by himself. One day a rag and bone man named Treacle Walker comes to the door, and Joseph trades a pair of used pajamas and a bone for his choice of one thing in a box. He chooses a jar. Treacle Walker also gives him a stone.

When he leaves, Treacle Walker tells him to clean his front step with the stone. The stone turns the dirty step white.

Joseph finds that he sees different things with his good eye than he sees with his bad eye. One day he sees the characters in one of his favorite comic books climb out of a cel and disappear through a mirror in his room. Using the stone, Joseph finds he can go through the mirror himself.

This is an imaginative novel told in some kind of vernacular. I wasn’t always sure what was going on, but the telling was enjoyable.

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Review 2579: A Short History of Nearly Everything

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I picked out A Short History of Neary Everything because it filled one of the last holes in my A Century of Books project and I generally enjoy Bill Bryson. I don’t know what I thought it was about—I think I expected it would be something like At Home, which told the histories of objects and rooms in an ordinary house. But silly me, it’s all science.

It’s not that I never read about science, but I have a limited tolerance for it.

When I first began reading it—actually for the first few chapters—I wondered who the audience for it was. It seemed to be telling about things I supposed most people know, so I wondered if it was for middle grade readers. But it certainly was never marketed that way.

It took a while before Bryson got to subjects that I wasn’t as familiar with, but in any case one of his strengths is finding out strange facts or biographical details of the scientists who made discoveries, so that he makes the material more interesting. And he writes with a lively style. However, he also really likes numbers, which are in general fairly meaningless to me (although he does make good comparisons to make them at least imaginable).

But this is a very long book, nearly 600 pages, and after a while I found myself skipping material. The first thing I skipped was the end of a chapter after it started getting too far into particle physics. Later, I skipped the entire chapter on cells. The geology chapter was interesting, but I was less than 100 pages from the end of the book when I finally pooped out. It didn’t even work to take a break and read a different book. It also didn’t help that such a book becomes rapidly out of date.

As a side note, I found the format of the library’s fancy version a little annoying. It used magazine-style callouts. That is, they didn’t provide additional information but just included quotes from the text. The purpose of such callouts in a magazine is to attract attention to the article, but in a book that you’re already reading?

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Review 2578: Catherine the Ghost

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I took a break from reading A Short HIstory of Nearly Everything to read this novella. After putting it on my list, I had forgotten that it was based on Wuthering Heights. If you’ve read that book, you should be okay, but otherwise Catherine the Ghost may be hard to follow.

Like Wuthering Heights, Catherine the Ghost begins with the arrival to the house of Mr. Lockwood, who is stranded and spends the night in Catherine’s bedroom. The ghost Catherine demands to be let in.

The novella begins there but goes forward with glimpses into the past instead of the other way around. It focuses on Catherine’s haunting of Heathcliff and ends at about the same place as the original novel. The ghost is one narrator.

The other narrator is the other Catherine, Catherine the ghost’s daughter, who was tricked into marrying Linton, her cousin, the son of Heathcliff’s enemy, Hindley.

Koja’s style of writing is poetical and unusual, as she frequently uses sentence fragments. However, it is easy to follow. This is a haunting novella. I liked it a lot.

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Review 2577: The Unfinished Clue

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Georgette Heyer can write such likable characters, and I remember that for the first Heyer mystery I read, it was obvious who the murderer was because the person was the only character in the book, besides the victim, that I didn’t like. It didn’t matter, because it was fun to read anyway.

She isn’t so obvious about it in The Unfinished Clue, because there are several characters to dislike or feel neutral about. In fact, the title is more of a giveaway than the characters’ behavior, because it tells you what to focus on. If you can guess what it means, though, you get a gold star.

Dinah Fawcett arrives at her sister’s house to be met with an enraged brother-in-law. General Arthur Billington-Smith is often enraged, and he takes it out on his fragile second wife, Fay. This time, his son, Geoffrey, has become engaged and is bringing home his fiancée Lola de Silva, a cabaret dancer.

The house party consists of these people plus Arthur’s nephew, Captain Francis Billington-Smith, who wants a loan; Camilla Halliday, an attractive young woman who is letting Arthur take liberties in the hope of a generous gift; her jealous husband Basil; and Stephen Guest, a friend who is in love with Fay. Geoffrey turns out to be kind of a wimp and an idiot, and Lola completely self-absorbed.

Arthur rages throughout the weekend, which culminates in a stormy Monday morning. He tells Geoffrey he will cut him off if he marries Lola. Geoffrey goes to Lola vowing eternal love, and she tells him of course she can’t marry him if he doesn’t have any money. He storms off. Fay is lying down from a headache. There is a short visit by Mrs. Chudleigh, the vicar’s wife. Then Mrs. Twinings arrives, an old friend, to try to get Arthur to treat Geoffrey better, and she finds Arthur dead in his office, stabbed in the neck with a dagger from his desk. The crime boils down to where everyone was between 12:30 and 1. Only Dinah, who was on the terrace the whole time, has an alibi.

In most of Heyer’s mysteries, her detective team is Hannasyde and Hemingway, but in this novel the detective is Inspector Hardy. She hasn’t thought up Hannasyde and Heminway yet, I don’t think, but there’s another good reason why this book is different.

I was completely fooled by this mystery. I had some idea of the motive but was mistaken about the identity of the killer.

Georgette Heyer is just as gifted as Christie in creating vivid characters, and her mysteries tend to be a bit funny. In this case, Lola is a hoot. I had lots of fun reading this to take a break from A Century of Books.

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WWW Wednesday!

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It’s the first Wednesday of the month, so it’s time for WWW Wednesday, an idea I borrowed from David Chazan, The Chocolate Lady, who borrowed it from someone else. For this feature, I report

  • What I am reading now
  • What I just finished reading
  • What I intend to read next

This is something you can participate in, too, if you want, by leaving comments about what you’ve been reading or plan to read.

What I am reading now

Right now, I’m reading There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. I’m not sure where I heard of this book, but I’m always interested in Russian writers. This book is written backwards, starting at the back of the book, and I’ve barely started it, so we’ll see how it goes. Also, it’s short, and although that usually doesn’t figure in to my reading, right now it’s a plus.

What I just finished reading

Well, that depends on how you count. I took a short plunge into Slowness by Milan Kundera. It is very short, and I hadn’t read any Kundera, was just familiar with the movie version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. However, it seemed more like a philosophical treatise than a novel. Almost nothing had happened by 20 pages in. I got bored. Yes, that’s right. Slowness was too slow for me. Not usually a problem.

So that leaves the book before, an Agatha Christie I hadn’t read before, Death Comes as the End. Unusually, it is set in Egypt, not in Christie’s Egypt but in 2000 AD or so. Still, it is a mystery.

What I intend to read next

It’s looking like my next book will be another mystery, The Widow of Bath by Margot Bennett. I read one other book by Bennett, and I liked it very much.

Review 2576: Moo

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I have an uneven relationship with Jane Smiley. I have by no means read all her books, but I found some of them to be entertaining (The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton and Horse Heaven) but her trilogy beginning with Some Luck to be over-rated. However, The Greenlanders was excellent, and I thought A Thousand Acres was one of the best books I ever read. Checking her oeuvre, I see now that I haven’t read any of her more recent books. This book is not one of the more recent.

Moo is set in the 1980s in Iowa in what used to be called an agricultural university (nicknamed “Moo U”). I believe the novel is supposed to be a satire. It starts with students, a boy named Bob whose job is to feed a pig as much as it can eat and take measurements, a project that seems only to be known about by the faculty member who is paying him, and four freshman girls, roommates.

But we don’t really get to know them, because then we meet a bunch of faculty members, administrators, and staff. The Spanish professor begins sleeping with the English professor. The Dean has decided, on almost no acquaintance, to marry the lunch lady. The provost seems to be entranced by money and about to make some sort of shady deal with the rich Texan who almost ruined the university’s reputation years ago. He’s seeing dollar signs in his eyes at a time when the college is cutting costs to the bone.

At page 120, I felt like I’d been introduced to about 50 people I only knew one or two things about and didn’t care. I assumed it was a satire, but nothing was funny, and it didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. So, sadly, this was a DNF for me.

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Review 2575: Lanark

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I was going to start my review of Lanark, considered by many to be a landmark of literature, by saying it has nothing to offer women. Its female characters are either cardboard creatures or sex objects or both. Its male protagonist fantasizes as a boy about raping girls. Its cover, with drawings by Gray, has a total of six naked women and one clothed man. (The rest of the figures are heads.) I was going to start with this (in fact, I have) until I came across a review in The Guardian from 2019 by Sarah Detum that calls it superb and talks about how clearly it sees how men regard women. But was it looking at that or exhibiting it? I’m not sure. And I don’t think that was Gray’s purpose. And I hope Detum isn’t right, because if so, it’s a depressing thought for most women.

The novel is broken into four parts and starts with Part 3. Then it breaks off into an apparently unrelated (but it isn’t) story, Parts 1 and 2, before returning to the original story in Part 4.

The novel begins in a city that has no sunlight. The protagonist, Lanark, is told it’s because developers have built the buildings so high up that light can only be seen for a few minutes at dawn. The city, Unthank, is an allegory for hell. Lanark can’t remember his past, and everyone else seems to spend their time hanging out in bars. Lanark can’t even get laid, despite ogling every woman he sees. What fresh hell is this?

I haven’t mentioned much of the science fiction/fantasy spin that seemed to fascinate critics in 1981, but that’s not unusual now. Of course, there’s the no-sun, but also people are developing weird diseases. Lanark begins getting dragon skin, where his skin turns black and scaly. And a woman has a mouth that talks appearing on her arm. I have to confess that this stuff seemed childish to me or like Gray took too much LSD when he was younger.

Lanark finally decides to make an end of it and drown himself in the sea. When he wakes up, he’s in an institute in an entirely different world. There, a seer begins telling him a story, set in post-World War II Glasgow, about Duncan Thaw (Part 1!).

The two sections about Duncan follow him through boyhood to young manhood. He is a stubborn person with his own ideas about what he wants to do, so he’s always butting up against authority figures. He finally begins studying to be an artist.

None of the sci-fi/fantasy elements exist in these two parts, and I found them the most readable. But Duncan is also the character with no social skills who fantasizes about raping women and never gets laid. What fresh hell is this again? (He gets a girl in the end. I can only wonder about her taste.)

Although the writing is such that I felt the novel was clipping along fairly well, it was when the book gets to Part 4 and returns to Unthank that I suddenly realized I had no interest in continuing it, in fact was dreading the return to Unthank despite knowing that most of the plot was in the last part of the book. That made me look around a bit to see if there was even one critic who agreed with me instead of gushing about what a masterpiece it was. (I was thinking maybe it was too dated.) Thank god for Jim Crowley of The New York Times, who, although largely complimentary, says, “The longer the book goes on, the more rapidly its magic leaks away,” (I didn’t think it had any) and calls its structure a Mobius strip.

Frankly, by then I was done, 200 pages from the end. Yes, it didn’t seem right to repay the effort it took to get that far by not finishing, but that’s what I did.

Lots of reviews called this novel playful, but to me it seemed distasteful and heavy. As for any magic it may have, that was overwhelmed for me by its misogyny.

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